Often times teachers within a school will get stuck on the same ideas for years and years without considering alternatives or ways to iterate on what they have. By seeing what people in other parts of the country are doing you can stumble on all sorts of interesting things.

Dan Meyer inspired a standards based grading strategy that has been incredibly successful in my classroom that I am working on rolling out to more content areas at Northbrook. Sam Shah is a Calculus teacher from New York with a vast amount of resources. He recently made a post about Algebra boot camp in Calculus that mirror an idea I had for my Pre-Calculus students. Frank Noschese has a very interesting 180 Day Photo Project that I might implement next year, if I can remember to take a picture every day.

Sharing your thoughts is a great way to get feedback from other teachers who might show you some items you may not have thought of before.

A lot of the tools I use in my classroom have been inspired by these people, something I would not have gotten on my own.